Redemption

by Joseph Rosenbloom

  For many years he had dealt openly with that fear. During his earliest civil rights leadership, in Montgomery, his front porch had been bombed. He proclaimed defiantly at a rally soon afterward: “Tell Montgomery that they can keep bombing, and I’m going to stand up to them. If I had to die tomorrow morning, I would die happy because I’ve been to the Mountaintop, and I’ve seen the Promised Land, and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.”11 In other speeches, memorably in Demopolis, Alabama, during the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, he had spoken about his fear that he might be killed. For years he felt a gnawing doubt that he would live to the age of forty. “I’ll never live to be forty. I’ll never make it,” he told his lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge.12

  By early 1968, as he entered his fortieth year, the fear was seizing him with fierce intensity. In a Sunday sermon on February 4 at Ebenezer, he dwelled on the prospect of his early death, effectively preaching his own eulogy. No need to catalog all the honors bestowed on him, he said. Rather, he said, “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others . . . [that he] was a drum major for justice.”13

  Not long after, on March 12, he sent synthetic red carnations to his wife. Until then all the flowers he had ever given her had been real. In justifying his choice of flowers, he told Coretta: “I wanted to give you something that you could always keep.”14 In late March, as he girded himself for the return to Memphis, he confided to his parents that they ought to brace for his death at any time.15

  Now, as he concluded his speech at Mason Temple, he seemed to be coming to terms with death to an extent that he had not voiced publicly before.

  His voice rose to its highest pitch yet. His eyes blinked rapidly, as he turned his head from side to side. He acknowledged that he wanted to live a long life but that he was resigned to whatever might happen. He said that God had allowed him to reach the mountaintop and see the Promised Land. Then he vowed resolutely, nobly: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know, tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”

  He ended with an utterance of religious fervor, saying that he was not worried, that he did not fear anybody, exclaiming in a final flourish, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

  That borrowing from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a staple of his oratory. The words, penned by Julia Ward Howe in 1861, venerate a fierce fight to the death in the name of freedom for American slaves. It is a call to abolitionists to follow Jesus in sacrificing themselves for a righteous cause. If King had completed the stanza, he would have added: “The truth is marching on.” But he did not. His wife, Coretta, reading his words spoken at Mason Temple, would think that he had become so overcome by emotion that he could not finish the stanza.16

  Coming to terms with the prospect of his death and his own sacrifice, King was approaching grandiosity. He was comparing himself to Jesus and Moses—to the Jesus heralded in the “Battle Hymn” and to the Old Testament’s celebration of the Moses who had led his people toward the Promised Land.

  Other speeches had drawn the parallel between the civil rights movement and the Exodus story. Now he was adding a new element. As Moses was to the Israelites’ struggle for freedom, he seemed to be saying, he was to African Americans’ struggle for freedom. As he stared at the face of death, he was portraying himself as the Moses of his time.

  He had talked for forty-three minutes. Spent by the exertion, tears welling in his eyes, he turned and staggered toward his chair on the podium. Wobbly, he seemed to lose his footing. Ralph Abernathy caught him and steered him into the chair. “It was as though somebody had taken a beach ball and pulled the plug out, as if all his energy had been sucked out,” the lawyer Mike Cody recalled.17

  As King collapsed into his chair, the crowd rose up from theirs, roaring and clapping. Historian Joan Beifuss would describe the crowd as “caught between tears and applause.”18

  Even among the ministers in the auditorium who knew King’s oratory well, the emotional charge of his words provoked shivers. “I’d never heard the intensity or the passion or the drama in his voice, in how he was delivering it, and he kept getting stronger and stronger,” Billy Kyles would say.19 He would add that King seemed to be preparing for his death by purging publicly “the fear. He had to get rid of it. He had to let all that go.” Abernathy would write in his memoir: “I had heard him hit high notes before, but never any higher.”20 Jesse Jackson would call his wife to tell her “Martin had given the most brilliant speech of his life [and say] that he was lifted up and had some mysterious aura around him.”21 Years later, Jackson would note: “What I thought was so different about that sermon, I saw men crying,” not something that happens usually in church.22 By the end, Kyles would say, “We were on our feet clapping and hollering.”23

  As often happened at the end of a compelling speech by King, the crowd surged toward him. Rather than allow a crowd to crush him, he usually exited quickly. “But that night he just didn’t want to leave,” Beifuss would quote a local minister as saying. “He just wanted to stay there and meet people and shake their hands and talk to them.”24 It was not an ordinary night.

  Chapter 16

  Long Night

  I just want to spend a quiet evening here with you without worrying about the problems that beset me.

  —MLK, comment to Georgia Davis, Chicago, spring of 1967

  BY THE END OF HIS SPEECH at Mason Temple, King was wrung out—not just physically but also emotionally. Yet, despite his fatigue and the wrenching drama of the evening, he was in a better frame of mind than he had been earlier in the day. The crowd’s jubilant reception seemed to dispel the gloom that had enveloped him.1

  There likely was another reason for his brighter spirits. He was expecting Kentucky state senator Georgia Davis, with whom he was having an affair, to arrive at the Lorraine that night. Davis was driving to Memphis from Florida, along with King’s younger brother, A.D., and another woman, Lukey Ward.

  Rather than return to his room at the Lorraine right away, King headed to a Memphis house for a late-night dinner. Bernard Lee and Ralph Abernathy went with him. The host was a friend of King’s, according to a memoir that Abernathy published years later. Abernathy did not identify the friend, except to say that she was a woman and a Memphian. The friend served steak and provided dinner partners, two other women, for Lee and Abernathy.2

  Following the meal the three men and three women sat in the living room of the house engaging in light conversation. Then, in Abernathy’s account, he and Lee dozed off in the living room, and King and the friend retired to another part of the house. It was long past midnight when King reappeared. The three men departed, taking a taxi through the incessant rain back to the Lorraine.3

  On arriving at the motel’s parking lot, King saw a pink Cadillac convertible bearing Kentucky license plates. He recognized the car as Lukey Ward’s. Despite the lateness of the hour, the lights were still burning brightly in A.D.’s room, 207, and in Davis’s, 201. King exited the taxi and knocked on the door of Room 207. He found Davis, Ward, and his brother in the room.4 They were still awake, restored to life by coffee.

  A few days before, while in Florida, Davis had the idea that she ought to join King in Memphis. After completing a hectic session of the Kentucky legislature, she was on a sun-and-surf vacation at Fort Walton Beach. Ward, a friend of hers and fellow civil rights activist, was with her there. From TV news Davis had learned of the rioting in Memphis on March 28.

  Stunned that the march being led by King had turned violent and concerned about King, Davis called the SCLC office in Atlanta. She did not reach him but left a message. When he returned the call, she told him that she was in Florida on vacation. “Are you getting a tan?” he teased, laughing.

  Next he asked, “Senator, why don’t you come help me?”5

  “Well,” she would recall replying, “I was thinking I’ve had about enough sun. I will be there Tuesday or
Wednesday.”6

  King’s brother, A.D., was then about to leave Louisville, where he was pastor at Zion Baptist Church, to join Davis and Ward in Fort Walton Beach. He intended to spend a few days with Ward. He was planning to fly back to Louisville afterward. But King called A.D. in Louisville, saying he needed his brother’s moral support in Memphis. A.D. agreed to come to Tennessee, but first he flew to Florida, arriving on Monday, April 1. Ward agreed to deliver A.D. and Davis to Memphis in her Cadillac. Early Wednesday morning, the threesome set out on the five-hundred-mile journey from Fort Walton Beach to Memphis.

  Davis had blocked out a month for sun and relaxation in Florida. Heeding King’s appeal for help, she had left Florida two weeks early. She felt that he needed her, that she could bolster his spirits as he faced the crisis in Memphis. Further, she would write in her memoir, she “felt guilty relaxing when so much needed to be done in the civil rights struggle.”7

  Nothing in Davis’s early life foreshadowed her future as one of the “real heroes,” as Kentucky governor Edward Breathitt would put it one day, of the civil rights movement in her state.8 She was born in a two-room cabin in the farming hamlet of Jimtown (short for Jim Crow Town) in central Kentucky. Her parents, Frances and Ben Montgomery, were just teenagers when they married. Frances was fifteen, Ben nineteen. Davis was the second oldest of the nine children they would have, and the only daughter.

  When she was seventeen months old, a tornado had ripped through their cabin. It might have killed her had not the mattress on her bed flipped and shielded her. Their house in ruins, the family sought refuge with relatives in Louisville. Her father landed a steady job in a foundry, and the family settled in Louisville and stayed.

  They managed well enough by the standard of the African American community of Louisville. They owned their house on Grand Avenue. (Muhammad Ali would eventually live two doors down.) Davis’s family always had food on the table. But her parents did not have the money to pay for their children’s college. Upon graduating from Central High School, Davis swore that one way or another she would go to college. She was barred from the University of Louisville, her first choice, because of her race. It was an affront she would never forget. “How we were discriminated against and segregated,” she would remember, “it put fire in my belly to make changes.”9

  She landed a two-year scholarship to attend all-black Louisville Municipal College but dropped out in her second year for lack of money. She married a man who promised to pay her tuition. He reneged, and they quickly divorced. She worked in a variety of jobs, including airplane riveter, sewing-machine operator, and data processor. She remarried, but the relationship with her second husband, a soldier, was often rocky.

  Politics came to her rather than the other way around. In 1962, when she was thirty-eight, Louisville mayor Wilson Wyatt recruited her to help with clerical duties in his campaign for governor. She could neither type nor take shorthand well, but Wyatt hired her anyway. In her memoir she would note that she entered politics as the Wyatt campaign’s “token black” to broaden his appeal to African American voters.10 Wyatt lost the election anyhow.

  Davis emerged from the Wyatt campaign with an itch for more politics. Over the next few years she worked on campaigns to elect Democratic candidates for governor and mayor. She gained a reputation as a crack political operative, with a savvy that she applied next to the state’s civil rights movement. As head of an advocacy group in Kentucky, the Allied Organization for Civil Rights, she organized protests and lobbied lawmakers to combat racial segregation.

  It was Davis’s work as a civil rights activist that led her to King. They did not meet until 1964. Like many Americans, she had become aware of him during the Montgomery bus boycott. She had seen him on television and admired him greatly. Hearing him talk, identifying with his commitment, she perceived a deep connection to her own feelings and convictions.

  In March 1964, King came to Kentucky to lead a march and speak at a rally in Frankfort, the state capital. Davis was an organizer of the event to build support for a desegregation bill before the legislature. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson was the other speaker.

  Davis and her brother, a funeral home director, met King at the airport. She would recall: “My heart quickened as I saw him move toward us. The first thing I noticed was his small stature. I was surprised. From his image on television or perhaps the one in my own mind, I had envisioned him being taller. His skin was a mahogany brown, and he wore a trimmed mustache above his full, shapely lips. His dark brown eyes looked straight into those of whomever he was addressing.”11

  King and Davis rode in her brother’s black funeral limousine to the capital building. On the way Davis briefed King about the pending civil rights bill and the plan for the day’s march and rally. He commended the plan, saying that the key to civil rights progress was a strategy of mass protests and economic boycotts. She would remember being struck by the “clarity of his words and thoughts.”12

  In March 1967, King was back in Louisville for an SCLC board meeting. By then Davis had become acquainted with King’s brother A.D., through her civil rights activity. Davis, who was then separated from her second husband, was working as a volunteer with a local civil rights group, the Kentucky Leadership Conference, which operated under the auspices of A.D.’s church.

  Without explaining why, A.D. asked Davis to come to his office at the church. “Martin has been thinking about you and wants to meet you at the Rodeway Inn,” she would remember A.D. saying to her.13 She replied, “I’ll think about it.”

  She slept with King that night. They would be together several more times. He sent her an airline ticket to join him while he was attending meetings in Chicago. They stayed in an apartment.14 He and Abernathy spent a night at her house in Louisville in May 1967. It was during the Kentucky Derby, when the hotels of Louisville were booked. She asked him to speak to a voter registration rally at the Green Baptist Church on August 3, 1967. He agreed. They were together in Louisville again at that time.15

  Years later, when she puzzled over why she had become his lover, she would admit to herself that she was not physically attracted to him. “He just wasn’t my type,” she would say.16 She would say that she enjoyed his company, that he was charming and funny, full of jokes. He would mimic other preachers to hilarious effect. He seemed joyful and relaxed with her.17 She was flattered by his interest in her. She would put it this way: “I was middle-aged and not feeling very attractive when Martin Luther King, the leader of the civil rights movement, the man who fought so valiantly to make the dream of all black people a reality, wanted to be with me.”18

  That King would have found her attractive, despite her feeling otherwise, was not surprising. Short, bright-eyed, shapely (she would describe herself as having a “full chest”), she had a winsome smile, a gentle, lilting voice, and a mirthful cackle of a laugh.19 From her King sought a soothing companion, and she must have satisfied that need. “He wanted compassion,” she would say. “He wanted to be cuddled.”20

  Yet they retained a certain formality in their manner toward each other. Many of King’s close friends called him Martin or M.L., but she always addressed him as Dr. King. To honor her request, he autographed a copy of his book Where Do We Go from Here. In the inscription he wrote: “To my friend, Georgia Davis, for whom I have great respect and admiration, Martin Luther King, Jr.” When she looked back to her time with him, she would not think of it so much as a love affair but rather as a warm friendship between two people who were fond of each other.

  Over the years, King turned to her as a lifeline to help his brother. The two brothers were close. A.D., who was seventeen months younger than King, had been best man at his wedding. But unlike his older brother, A.D. was a troubled soul. He had bowed to his father’s wishes that he become a preacher but did not find it much to his liking. Davis thought that A.D. had a low opinion of himself, an inferiority complex, which she attributed to his living in the shadow of a renowned brother.21 A.D. suff
ered from chronic alcoholism. When he was on a bender, he would drift into sordid nightspots where a Baptist preacher had no business going.

  On more than one occasion King called Davis to say that his brother was so despondent that he was threatening suicide. King would ask her to intervene and help sober him up. She would hurry to A.D.’s house. His wife, Naomi, would let her in. Davis would find A.D. in a bedroom and ask what was wrong. Davis would recall how she would scold him. She would ask, “Why would you put that burden on your brother with all the problems he has?”22 A.D. would reply that he was really okay, and she should not worry: he was not going to kill himself. But the brother’s alcoholic binges were a continual source of worry to King.

  In 1967 Davis hit upon a bold idea. Instead of working to elect another candidate for public office, she would work to elect herself. She jumped into the race for the Kentucky Senate. It seemed very much a long shot. No African American or woman had ever been elected a Kentucky state senator. In her district, whites outnumbered blacks by almost two to one. She had the guts to run anyhow, and she won.

  She had served only three months in office when she arrived in Memphis in the early morning of April 4. Having found A.D., Ward, and Davis awake and in a talkative mood, King sat down with them in Room 207. King and his brother were in lighthearted spirits. They rattled off a round of jokes. The room filled with laughter.23

  Not all of the chatter was lighthearted. The new arrivals had questions for King. What about the violence that had erupted during the march six days earlier? As Davis would recount, King said that he was concerned, that “they had rushed him out of the area, and what would people say [about his courage and leadership]?”24 King was being pilloried in the press for having left the scene of the riot, even though the full story should have noted that he had done so under instructions from the police.